MegaCITY Dallas/ForthWorth

By Andrew Herd (23 August 2005)

egular readers will be aware that I am a huge fan of PC Aviator's MegaSceneries and MegaCities, and the latest release is one of their best yet. Dallas/Fort Worth covers the famous 4,000 square mile twin city metroplex that includes not only the 6th busiest airport in the world - DFW International - and scores of other fields that range from recreational to international. As usual with the MegaCities, the textures have been created from very high resolution aerial photographs, which makes VFR navigation a dream if you have the correct sectional and every flight immense fun even if you don't.

In case you haven't already seen any of the MegaScenery packs, Dallas/Fort Worth replaces the repetitive tiles that make up the default FS2004 scenery with actual photographs of the ground which lock into the precise position they occupy in real life. This means that every road, interchange, street, house, factory, warehouse, mall, stadium, ball field, golf course, playground, river and stream can be seen from your cockpit and the effect is about as real as you can get when you are flying a PC. Instead of Flight Simulator's sparse, angular roads and gravity defying rivers, you get the real McCoy, which lets you fly the way real pilots do, down I-20 and then hanging a left on highway 820; if you are used to the featureless wasteland of the default scenery, the result of installing Dallas/Fort Worth is a pretty spectacular makeover.

The good news for simmers with older PCs is that the package can be run on any PC that is capable of loading FS2004, as long as there is 1 Gb of hard disk space available. The reason why there isn't any additional processor overhead is that Flight Simulator treats one texture set the same as another; there being no impact on the game as long as the file sizes are relatively similar. The downside of this situation is that Flight Simulator loads the ground textures almost as an afterthought, after it has done all the rest of its housekeeping, which means that photographic sceneries are prone to occasional attacks of blurring, which happens when the sim has its hands full of some other task and doesn't get around to shuffling the textures into their final positions. If you hit W and swap out the 2D panel of a plane, then look at the ground as it passes under you, you will be able to see the default textures doing this - because these are repetitive, the effect isn't as obvious as it becomes with a photographic set. It doesn't seem to matter how fast a PC you are using, blurring occurs now and again and the problem tends to be worse the faster you fly and the more turns you make. The good news is that it doesn't cause too many problems with GA touring or straightforward airliner departure/approaches, but if you like flying fast and low in military hardware, photo scenery will definitely cause heartache.

The package is only available on CD-ROM in a DVD-style box and installs automatically; all that is necessary being to stick the disk in the drive, kick off the routine and go have a coffee. At the end of the installation, there is an option to configure FS2004 to optimise the package, but I skipped this, having done it in the past for other MegaSceneries. I tested the addon using DreamFleet's excellent Boeing 727, an undervalued sim if there ever was one, the plane being one of the best airliners ever released for FS2004 and ideal for testing this kind of scenery package. The flight was a straight out departure from KDFW, a turn onto 080 and climb to 10000 feet, before making a rate one turn to pass back over the airport at 15000. Visibility on the day I chose was 80 miles.

One of the most impressive features of the package is KDFW itself, which handles over two and half thousand flights a day, distributed across seven runways. Microsoft's airport is considerably enhanced by finding itself seated among the huge suburb that has grown up over the years and visual arrivals and departures are much more realistic when you can appreciate the true extent of the city around you. The developers have gone to a good deal of trouble realigning all the custom Autogen objects, but in this package they have also enhanced the standard Autogen, which appears 'on top' of the phogographic tiles. If that isn't enough, you also get improved night scenery and you can use an applet called 'Water Chooser' to choose between having lakes with photographic, but unlandable textures, or default, but landable water - either way, the outlines of the lakes are corrected, so at long last it becomes possible to navigate using them. The lakes are a particular feature of the package because there are so many of them, including lake Arlington, lake Lewisville, lake Joe Pool, lake Ray Hubbard and lake Grapevine, one of the best things about Water Chooser being that you can use it to swap the water properties between photoreal and landable as often you like.

KDFW isn't the only game in town and among the airports within the scenery area are Dallas Love Field, Meacham International and Dallas Naval Airfield (although PC Aviator call it this, DNAS has been known as Hensley Field for about a decade is currently undergoing heavy maintenance) whose main runway is interesting because it extends out into Mountain Creek Lake. The package doesn't include any specific buildings for these airports, but as far as I can tell the developers have made sure that all the default scenery lines up with the runways and airport environs.

As you can see, the MegaCity transforms the Dallas/Fort Worth area. I haven't included any shots of the default scenery, but a standard FS install comes a very poor second by comparison and there is no way you could use it for VFR navigation around the area. The one drawback of installing the MegaCity is that you want it to go on forever and when you arrive at an edge, the join between the photographic tiles and the default ones is hard to ignore.

As it happens, a 080 climbout from DFW takes you down one of the long axes of the photographic tiles, so that it takes a while to reach an edge in the 727, but there is little doubt what has happened when you do. Short of PC Aviator releasing the entire continental US as a photographic scenery on 400 DVDs, and all of us buying several terabytes of storage to put it on, there are only two solutions I can think of to fix this. The first is for the developers to 'blend' all the edge tiles so that they match as well as possible into the default textures; the other is for PC Aviator to release a set of textures which replace Microsoft's default set. The second option is probably the more practical of the two and I guess if there is enough demand for it, the company might think seriously about such a development, because the MegaSceneries are a 'must have' for simmers who do any serious flying in the US and virtually all the simmers who do any serious stateside flying have them.

There is no impact at all on frame rates, but one of the areas where the package does slow FS2004 down is as far as loading times are concerned. All texture packages do this, the hit occurring when the load bar is at the 50% mark, when everything slows to a crawl as the textures have to be accessed; if your flight starts in a MegaCity area, getting past this phase can take a couple of minutes or more depending on how fast your PC is, but after that, Flight Simulator runs at the same speed it always does.

One of the things you don't get with Dallas/Fort Worth are any charts, but the relevant sectional is available from Sporty's for something like $8.00, so it shouldn't break the bank. (Or download freeware images of the DFW sectional chart or the DFW terminal area chart.) Once you get to know the scenery, the sectional becomes superfluous as the lakes and roads are so distinctive that it is a real challenge getting lost, although I am sure that high pressure haze can change all that. The other feature that the package lacks is any winter textures, but c'mon, this is T*E*X*A*S, guys. The Lone Star state doesn't do snow. Mostly.

That is pretty much all there is to say about yet another superb release by PC Aviator. The center screenshot above shows the extent of the photo-tile area and just how much the default scenery contrasts against it - once you get to the flight levels you will almost always be able to see an edge, but by then any need for VFR nav will be long past and simmers who enjoy pushing tin will be fiddling around with the prog keys on their FMCs. And before you are done admiring the pics, just take another look at screenshot 9; that's the picture on the right two rows above. Look at that water - inviting, huh?

This isn't the kind of package that can have bugs, so the best I can say is that it worked well for me and unlike a lot of the review software I see, it is staying on my hard disk. All the shots are taken with Microsoft landable water installed, but using Flight1's Flight Environment's water textures - I am sure you will agree that the effect is about as real as it gets and I hope that the developers are planning to issue upgrades to earlier packages in the series so that floatplane fans can show off their skills. The best thing is that now that PC Aviator have three MegaCity packages out, it is possible to plan flights that begin and end in different photoscenery areas. A little bit of playing around with the Flight Planner reveals that Denver (KDEN) to Dallas/Fort Worth (KDFW) is just over a thousand nautical miles, making it a great flight in the DreamFleet 727 or the standard-setting Flight1 ATR. KDFW to San Francisco International (KSFO) is 2500 nm or so, which demands something bigger, perhaps the fantastic Level D 767, or the classic Captain Sim 707. Then again, if you have the Pacific Northwest MegaScenery, you could haul some passengers from KDFW all the way to sleepless Seattle, nearly 2700 nm, or even out east to sample the New York MegaScenery, a journey of around 2200 nm.

Photographic scenery is one of the final frontiers that lies between simulation and real flight. Looking at the screenshots above, it is tempting to dream about what Flight Simulator might look like if we could get entire continents of photoscenery - at the moment, we have to do with smaller area than that, but if you want to fly in the future, today, check out MegaCity Dallas/Fort Worth. You won't be disappointed.